Generate a self-signed certificate with OpenSSL

Although not really useful in production, generating a self-signed certificate can be a great way to test the HTTPs functionality of on application locally.

To generate a self signed certificate you'll need to have OpenSSL installed. Once that's done, creating the certificate is as easy as running the following in your terminal:

openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 \
            -nodes \
            -keyout private_key.pem \
            -x509 \
            -days 365 \
            -out certificate.pem

It will create two files. A private key file private_key.pem (used by your server/application to sign responses), and a certificate certificate.pem, which is used by clients to encrypt requests and verify the origin of the data.